New Horizons
By Josh Brown
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The year is 2034 and prisons across the UK are overflowing with sub-Postmasters found guilty of crimes against letters. Information provided by a credible and functioning as intended accounting software has condemned Postman Pat and even his black and white cat to the Royal Mail gulags.
The currency of the United Kingdom has been replaced with stamps and the Postmaster general makes weekly announcements about changes to the rations and reads the lists of the newly condemned to the nation at teatime.
In their luxurious oak furnished office, the postmaster general polishes their CBE before being interrupted by the ping of a notification. They rush over to their desk to be greeted by an alert from the Horizons system which faithfully reports the wrong doings of the underlings. This time however, there was something strange… frightfully strange. The system displayed categorically that the Postmaster General themselves had been cooking the books and fleecing the almighty Royal Mail Group Limited!
‘This must be a mistake’, thought the Postmaster General. But they remembered that Horizon has not once in its entire service made a single mistake. After all, computers can’t make mistakes, it’s all ones and zeroes. A shiver ran down their spine as they realised that they were already convicted. A sham trial would be arranged but it would be a drumhead court that would condemn the perpetrator with one hundred percent certainty.
‘The Post Office is never wrong’ the Postmaster General says as they begin to convince themselves that they must have been stealing all along. ‘I mean the computer says so’. They scribble an address on their forehead and paste a stamp to their cheek, then they glumly climb into a comically large post-box never to be seen again.
__________
This is, of course, fantasy. The higher ups at Royal Mail or Postmaster General would never take responsibility, regardless of how many people they must throw under the bus.
Fortunately for us in reality, the government of 2024 is taking swift action to free and compensate the wrongfully accused postmasters and postmistresses who were tormented and harassed by the post office and other groups.
Sunak, taking a break from bombing stuff halfway around the globe, (one of the UK’s favourite pastimes) has promised to pass ground-breaking legislation to overturn criminal convictions in this historic miscarriage of justice. This swift action only comes nearly a decade after the scandal first broke and after government ministers became aware of issues with the horizon software and possible illegitimacy of the prosecutions.
It was of course pretty rapidly thrown together as the airing of the ITV programme ‘Mr. Bates Vs The Post Office’ saw the scandal rise to the top of the political agenda. It is good to know that TV shows are now dictating government policy. It’s clear that ‘Succession’ has been a blueprint for Tory party internal politics for the last few years now. Political forecasters have suggested 2024 will be ‘Black Mirror’ inspired by a dusting of ‘Alan Partridge’.
